7. Streaming Applications

While Spring Boot provides the foundation for creating DevOps friendly microservice applications, other libraries in the Spring ecosystem help create Stream based microservice applications. The most important of these is Spring Cloud Stream.

The essence of the Spring Cloud Stream programming model is to provide an easy way to describe multiple inputs and outputs of an application that communicate over messaging middleware. These input and outputs map onto Kafka topics or Rabbit exchanges and queues. Common application configuration for a Source that generates data, a Process that consumes and produces data and a Sink that consumes data is provided as part of the library.

7.1 Imperative Programming Model

Spring Cloud Stream is most closely integrated with Spring Integration’s imperative "event at a time" programming model. This means you write code that handles a single event callback. For example,

In this case the String payload of a message coming on the input channel, is handed to the log method. The @EnableBinding annotation is what is used to tie together the input channel to the external middleware.

7.2 Functional Programming Model

However, Spring Cloud Stream can support other programming styles. The use of reactive APIs where incoming and outgoing data is handled as continuous data flows and it defines how each individual message should be handled. You can also use operators that describe functional transformations from inbound to outbound data flows. The upcoming versions will support Apache Kafka’s KStream API in the programming model.